Winning the Lottery - Before Your Very Eyes
Thanks for the emails I received from the last post. Feedback is the grist for my Lotto Blog mill, as is the case today. The emails got me thinking about how the odds of winning the lottery jackpot change during the drawing itself. If you can imagine for a moment, millions of people, tickets in hand, watching a lotto drawing on TV. As each number is drawn, the fortunes of millions of lottery ticket holders are changing before your very eyes.
Here’s what I mean. Let’s use the Lotto Texas 6/54 lottery in this example. Of course, if someone doesn’t buy a ticket their odds of winning the jackpot are zero. If someone buys 1 ticket, their odds of winning the jackpot are 1:25,827,165. Now, as the drawing begins things get very interesting.
Suppose you’re sitting in Austin, in front of your TV, watching the drawing. The first number is drawn. You check your ticket and your ticket has that number. What just happened? You’re now in a different league. There are 53 balls left in the machine and you need 5 of those 53 to win the lottery jackpot. Suddenly, your playing a 5/53 game and your odds of winning the lottery jackpot improved to 1:2,869,685. That’s 9 times better than before the drawing started just moments earlier.
So, right there, in that instant, you’re pumped and awaiting that next number to pop out of the machine, while most players in Texas watched their odds of Winning the Lottery jackpot drop to zero.
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